'Lord Give Me Chastity, But Not Yet.....'*

As an occasional pursuer of porn
and a serial reader of detective fiction
of the type where it's selling point
is how much it lacks elegance
I was recently surprised when I realised
how alike these two interests I had were.

Both cut to the chase with indecent haste,
both make a lack character development
their chief virtue and both keep you seeking
by never giving their pursuer/reader
what they actually want; a truly satisfying ending.

*the youthful prayer of St Augustine of Hippo
as recalled in his forties in his 'Confessions',
written circa 400 A.D. in Latin. It is a book
that I read all the way through, once. But,
like the works of Kierkegaard, it is a book
that I would now find had too many words in it
and its ideas are presented in the wrong order
-but then again what is modern man meant to do
with history, beyond argue against it? That is
what St Augustine and Kierkegaard did.....

My List Of Unread Books

includes......

'Deuteronomy for Dummies' - the easy guide to most convoluted and hard-to-understand book in The Old Testament. Only 'The Book of Numbers' comes close to any similar level complexity, and the numbers in it are notably benign compared with the destruction they bear witness to.

'The Art of the Graceful Refusal'  - where a kind word of refusal does not stop somebody asking again. What it does achieve is putting a longer time between requests, and a calmness into both the request and the refusal.

The follow up was called 'The Old Declension' which is a more detailed delineation of how older refusals have maintained their charm right into the present day.

'Great Dogs I have Met' - Not quite like this, which I liked a lot, but close.

'Logorrhea and Misanthropy'  - Where the celebrated author Will Self writes at great length with as many long words as humanly possible about never wanting to write for the public again.

'Bathing in Bathos' -  Such an anti-climax of a book that I can hardly begin to describe even the introduction of it to readers other than myself, for fear of narcolepsy.

These titles will be hard to find. The following are more accessible, but equally hard to read....

'The Collected Works of Kierkegaard', - Soren Kierkegaard has been one of my heroes since I read his diaries in full - once, half a lifetime ago. But I fell at the first hurdle with many of his other voluminous writings which were written after he fueled himself with very strong coffee in the mornings.

'In Search of Lost Time' - Marcel Proust. Sometimes the time we lose we never get back. Reading this would take all too much time away from me given the list of other unread books on this list and I want a room like the one he wrote them in, in which to read them.

'Darkness at Noon' by Arthur Koestler, which I am given to believe is a cold war thriller about shady governments manipulating the daytime weather.

Last but far from least on this book list is 'Suicide for Non-Beginners' by that famously advanced author Anthony Weir.....

The Blinkers Of Choice

With the advent of mass digital media
coming at us, from us, and from all sides,
we are warned to be very careful
about where we get our news from,
lest the presentation be tainted
with bias or foreign money/power.

But such warnings were much rarer
when the media was so analogue
that nobody needed to call it that.

I remember the small grubby emporia
in which the underground press used to appear,
the anarchist book shops full of books
that were more-left-wing-than-Left-Wing-Politics.
The sort of read where where the ink
came off on my fingers as I read
of squatting, of angry feminism,
of drugs I could never find - much less take,
and other fantastical narratives
I was never ever going to live out
.
Many of these stories lit up my life.
These texts became the pin-pricks
with which I tried to deflate
a very dull every-day reality
from which I wanted to escape,
and each text worked, for a while.

Those books never came with warnings,
the censors never knew where to look.